Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
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A Manager’s Preoccupation: 1-1 Meetings and Focused Prioritization with Joseph Griffiths (2/2)
Your manager has a preoccupation, but do you know what it is? The answer reveals a clue about their focus and the culture this manager will foster. Join us in episode 328 as Joseph Griffiths shares advice for making 1-1s with your manager and skip-level manager more productive, guidance for the aspiring managers listening, and observations from managing both technical and sales teams. We look at all this through the lens of a manager’s focused prioritization, the difficult part of being consistent, and the reasons we should all use boundaries and limits to improve the quality of our work. Original Recording Date: 04-17-2025 Joseph Griffiths is a tech industry veteran with experience across technical sales, enterprise architecture, and systems administration. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Joseph, check out Episode 327 – A Passion for Growth: Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills with Joseph Griffiths (1/2). Topics – Optimizing 1-1 Meetings with Your Manager, Priorities as a Manager, Observations from Managing Different Personas, Manager Preoccupations and Culture Indicators, Advice for Future Managers 2:55 – Optimizing 1-1 Meetings with Your Manager What would Joseph tell the individual contributor who isn’t used to 1-1 meetings with their manager or doesn’t know how to leverage them effectively? “Everyone appreciates a human perspective…. If I as a manager come to the table and say, ‘here’s my agenda for the 1-1 that I expect you to do every week,’ it’s going to be real hard to come to me and be honest about the things you’re struggling with. It’s really, really hard to talk to someone who’s only business. As a manager it’s a lot easier if I just keep it business because then if issues happen or stuff it’s less emotional entanglement. But I think it’s the wrong way to do it. My job is to serve the people. My goal for 1-1 was to first breed trust and comfort.” – Joseph Griffiths The secondary goal of Joseph’s 1-1s was to allow the individual to share items that require his help, encouraging honesty about the challenges. Sometimes, a manager does need to use the 1-1 to deliver specific information that is best shared 1-1 (i.e. compensation changes, policy changes, etc.). Joseph usually had 1 thing he wanted to cover with the individual per 1-1. The rest of the meeting was for the individual to control the agenda. Joseph would recommend we take 5 minutes before a 1-1 with our manager to think about the overarching challenge we’re having rather than what is top of mind. “It’s very easy to walk into there and come out of a bad meeting the hour before and go, ‘I just had a horrible meeting and this is why.’ But is that really the problem, or should we be talking about something that is bigger or wider or more challenging? I think spending 5 minutes preparing with a OneNote sheet or a Notepad or whatever and just writing down…these are the 3 things that I want to talk about…and I need either some guidance for them or I need you to knock down a wall. That’s another one. Ask your manager to knock down a wall.” – Joseph Griffiths, on 1-1s with your manager Every manager is different, so you will need to feel things out with your manager when it comes to knocking down walls. Joseph says we can also bring ideas to the 1-1 for things that might improve the health of the business. If our manager agrees with our ideas, they can support the ideas and give us greater visibility within the organization. Joseph mentions when we have an idea, it is unique and special. But it’s also something we are likely to spend extra energy and effort doing. Joseph consistently sought to support innovative ideas from his team members and promote them up to his leaders. This kind of thing makes both the manager and more importantly the individual contributor look good. People often bring only their problems to their manager, but don’t forget to bring ideas too. Nick says we could all use more practice thinking about those higher-level problems. Even front-line managers need to do this when communicating with their own managers (i.e. think a level higher). Joseph tells a story about a friend of his who is a CEO. This person goes to lunch with his team each Friday. Afterward, he gets a pencil and a pad of paper, turns off his cell phone, and goes to a nearby park to think about his business for a few hours. Anything that comes to him gets written on the pad of paper. On Monday morning, the CEO begins executing on the things he thought of while at the park. This exercise allows him to be more proactive. “I think we could all benefit from turning off the notifiers, turning off the noise, and spending an hour just thinking about where we are and actually making some plans. That proactivity is missing…. The notifiers in the world that we live in are very dopamine driven by trying to get you to react…. We get so busy that we’re reacting to everything that we don’t take time to think, and then we don’t prioritize the most important activities….” – Joseph Griffiths, on a CEO friend’s proactivity It’s easy to be overly busy. Someone once told Joseph, “Busy is the new stupid.” While he did not understand it at the time, he certainly does now. Take 5-10 minutes before 1-1s to think about what you want to say. These 1-1s are opportunities to expand your influence. Take advantage! What about 1-1s with a skip level leader? Joseph encourages us to get a human connection with them just like you would with a customer. This could be the sports team they like or something else. A human connection opens the door to more conversations in the future. “You don’t want to stand around and complain…not a good move. You want to have a conversation that leaves that person thinking, ‘this is a really smart person. This is a person who is doing really good work.’ So, the best thing you can bring to that are stories of things that are going well with your customers in sales or going well with your job function. Those stories are going to be something that they take away from that and share with other people. You’re going to be giving them value…human connection and value are the 2 things you want to provide in that skip-level.” – Joseph Griffiths Second-line managers have direct reports who are managers. They have heard about all the problems and know what is going on because they talk about them daily. Joseph says the skip-level 1-1 is not an opportunity to illustrate problems. 9:42 – Priorities as a Manager How do you optimize your tasks as a manager and focus on the right things? This is something from Nick’s perspective, Joseph did very well as a manager. “It is really easy to get engaged in lots of things and doing lots of things ok. It’s much harder to be engaged in a few things and do them spectacularly. In any company we work for we will have millions of opportunities to do things. We need to choose to do the things that are, number 1, aligned with the role that we have…what we’re getting paid to do…and secondarily the things that have the highest overall payoff for the effort.” – Joseph Griffiths As a technical sales manager, Joseph had a key performance metric – the quota. It’s the only measurement that matters in sales. Joseph also had a team, and he had customers (the company’s customers). He often had to ask how what he was doing helped him hit the quota. There is a natural quarterly cadence in sales. There are a number of activities which happen automatically as a part of this cadence. “It can get very easy to just follow the cadence like you’re riding up and down a hill. And cadence is actually good. What you need to do is understand what you have to insert into the cadence to achieve the results of your KPI.” – Joseph Griffiths If Joseph knew his team would need 60 days to perform a necessary task in the sales cycle, he would plan for them to start those activities 180 days in advance, so everything is complete before it’s time for deal management. Sales can be somewhat unpredictable, so you then focus on what’s most important. “For me, my first job as a manager is the people that report to me. They are the most important thing.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph shares the story of a former manager named Josh. Anytime Joseph would call Josh, he would pick up the phone and tell Joseph “I have as much time as you need.” It wasn’t that Josh wasn’t busy. He just made time for the most important things. We should prioritize things by importance and let other things slide by. Joseph could vacuum his floor every day, but he doesn’t. He puts up with dirt for a couple of days and then vacuums. That is prioritization. Prioritize by importance within your job function. This principle does not change regardless of your job level (individual contributor, manager, vice president, owner of the company, etc.). Delegate to others if it is their job, and let them fail if needed. Do we lose sight of what the priorities are because of having too many tasks? Joseph says it’s negative aversion. We don’t like to say no and are afraid we will be perceived negatively if we do. We can lose sight of priorities at times, but it’s challenging to say no to things. Joseph once had a manager named Adam who told him, “You need to learn the great art of no, however…. You need to learn that because everything to you is, ‘yes and I’ll do it myself.’” Joseph doesn’t suggest we directly say no. We can be helpful without taking on things as a personal challenge. People don’t want to be seen as the one who says no or that they can’t do something. People also don’t want to be seen as someone who is overloaded. Both are triggers to people telling themselves they are unreliable. “As a society, Americans are people pleasers.” – Joseph Griffiths 15:12 – Observations
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